Why are babies referred to as Universalists?
|
When a child comes into our church family, whether because just born, just adopted, or recently joined our congregation, we UUs celebrate with a ceremony called a dedication. The purpose is to welcome the child, declare his or her name, and promise our support to his or her parents, and the ceremony is always very sweet and joyful — everyone in the congregation is smiling. Dedications are not just for babies! When an older child wishes to have a dedication, we’ll work with them and their family to make a ceremony that’s appropriate for them. Instead of doing as we have done in recent years, and celebrating most dedications at two services per year, we are going to plan dedication dates with each family. If you would like to know more, contact Amy or Dan. Show A child dedication is meant to be a community celebration of the arrival of a new life into the world. During this ritual, we celebrate the baby or child’s name, declare our support for the parents, and affirm our commitment to help raise each child in our midst with mindful attention, compassion, and love. We dedicate babies because we believe that every new child deserves to be officially welcomed to this life. Theologically, we believe that each person is born whole and beloved, with the world of possibilities open before them. Follen’s minister, Rev. Claire Feingold Thoryn, creates child dedications with an eye to the family’s theological and religious beliefs, keeping in mind the values, principles, and covenants that Unitarian Universalists share. This ritual is generally reserved for Follen members and friends because it receives its meaning and significance from the religious community that is dedicating itself to the child’s spiritual upbringing. The congregation is called to promise that we will do our part in supporting the child’s life and learning, and we will support the parents in their efforts to bring the child up according to their own deepest beliefs and values. Child dedications are usually done near the beginning of a regular, Sunday morning church service. If you are interested in having your child be dedicated or baptized, please contact Rev. Claire at .
See the article in its original context from TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. About the Archive This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them. Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions. BABIES learn the basic sounds of their native language by the age of 6 months, long before they utter their first words, and earlier than researchers had thought, a new study suggests. The findings indicate that recognition of these sounds is the first step in the comprehension of spoken language. As a result, the researchers suggest, babies whose hearing is damaged by chronic ear infections may have lifelong language problems, and the way parents speak to their infants exerts important influences on language learning. Previous studies suggested that infants' sound perception changes by about 1 year old, when children begin to understand that sounds convey word meanings. The new research, reported in the current issue of Science, was conducted by Dr. Patricia Kuhl of the University of Washington in Seattle and colleagues at Stockholm University in Sweden, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Texas in Austin. Adaptability of Newborn Newborns are language universalists, Dr. Kuhl said. Able to learn any sound in any language, they can distinguish all the sounds that humans utter. But adults are language specialists, she said. Exposure to their native language reduces their ability to perceive speech sounds that are not in that native tongue. Thus Japanese infants can hear the difference between the English sounds "la" and "ra," but Japanese adults cannot because their language does not contrast those sounds. Dr. Kuhl said she and her colleagues set out to discover when, during language development, experience alters sound perception and to explore the nature of the change. She said she had thought it could be earlier than other researchers believed. Recognizing Slight Differences To test her idea, she used the concept of phonetic prototypes: idealized mental representations of the key sounds in a given language. An English prototype sound is the vowel linguists write as "i," pronounced as in the word "fee." When an adult English speaker hears something very close to this "i" sound (as when the sound is spoken by someone with a head cold), Dr. Kuhl said, the listener will hear the prototype "i" and not the slight variation. The prototype sound acts like a magnet, she said, pulling all similar sounds into one mental slot for language processing. But the same is not true of foreign languages. Because English speakers have not memorized the prototype for a foreign vowel -- like the Swedish vowel "y" (an EE-sound pronounced with front-rounded lips), they can discern when the vowel is pronounced slightly differently. They have no "magnet" that makes the sounds identical. Using identical computer equipment to generate prototype Swedish and English sounds, Dr. Kuhl and her colleagues tested the magnet effect on 64 6-month-old babies in Sweden and the United States. During the experiment, each baby sat on its mother's lap and listened to pairs of "i" and "y" sounds. Babies were trained to look over their left shoulders when they heard a difference in the sounds (they would see a cute puppet bang a drum) and to ignore any sound pairs that seemed the same. American babies routinely ignored the different pronunciations of "i" because they heard it as the same sound, Dr. Kuhl said. But they could distinguish slight variations in the "y" sounds. The exact opposite was true of the Swedish babies, she said. They ignored the variations in "y" because they sounded the same, while they noticed the variations in "i." The experiment confirms that linguistic experience in the first half year of life alters an infant's perception of speech sounds, Dr. Kuhl said. Infants show a significantly stronger magnet effect for their native language prototypes. The study shows that phonetic perception does not depend on the emerging use of words, Dr. Kuhl said, and that language experience shapes perception far earlier than anyone expected. The research calls attention to the language tutoring role of parents, Dr. Kuhl said. By talking "motherese" with its high pitch, exaggerated intonation and clear pronunciation, she said, parents help babies acquire phonetic prototypes that are building blocks to language. The study also underscores the importance of treating chronic ear infections in infants, Dr. Kuhl said. There is evidence that such infections may impair language development later in life. How old are most babies when they say their first word?Babies communicate using sounds and gestures. In the first year of life, babies go from babbling to playing with sounds, copying sounds and putting sounds together. First words might start at around 12 months.
Do newborns prefer to hear their native language?Indeed, there is evidence that 6-month-old infants prefer to listen to words of their own language (Jusczyk et al., 1993), and when they can choose whether to listen to a continuous speech stream in their native language or in a foreign language, already 2-days-old newborns prefer to listen to the speech stream in ...
At what age will a child begin to combine three words?24 to 36 months
During this period, your child will begin to use three-word sentences. Their sentences will increase in length over this period.
Why and when do babies lose the ability to discriminate the sounds of any of the languages around the world?Neonates are able to discriminate between the different sound levels and duration, different phonemes and constants of all the languages they are exposed to. However when they turn 12 months of age this ability disappears and they are only able to discriminate the phonemes of their native language.
|
